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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22455982">La Vie En Rose</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DJoftheCoven/pseuds/DJoftheCoven'>DJoftheCoven</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Kingdom Hearts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining Sora (Kingdom Hearts), coming to terms with sexuality, gay repression</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-01-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-01-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 16:20:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,925</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22455982</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DJoftheCoven/pseuds/DJoftheCoven</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>quand il me prend dans ses bras,<br/>il me parle tout bas,<br/>je vois la vie en rose.<br/>il me dit des mots d'amour,<br/>des mots de tous les jours.</p>
<p>(when he takes me into his arms,<br/>he speaks to me softly,<br/>and I see the world through rose-colored glasses.<br/>he tells me words of love.<br/>they are everyday words.)</p>
<p>- Edith Piaf</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>49</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>La Vie En Rose</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Sora is a piñata and I am the angry 13 year old whose parents just got divorced</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sora really didn’t mean to damn himself to an eternity of grueling torture, but well, he was not exactly known for his intellect.</p>
<p><em> That’s just what I get for losing myself in a daydream in Yen Sid’s office</em>, he thought as he mindlessly threw supplies into a bag. The old mentor had a sixth sense for when people were sleeping through his lectures. Most of the time that slack fell to Lea, who couldn’t stay awake during a briefing to save his life, but Sora was also pretty high up on the list of those who were forced to agree with whatever Yen Sid was saying at last minute and just pray that it wasn’t something too bad.</p>
<p>Oh, but the universe was not happy with Sora today. It <em>really</em> wanted him to feel the burn for his slacking.</p>
<p>Sora had been rudely shaken out of a warm, happy fantasy by a piercing gaze just in time for the old wizard to ask him a question. His eyes looked cold and calculating as they met Sora’s ocean blue stare. Sweat began forming on the back of Sora’s neck, which he wiped away with an absentminded fist as he thought of a way to ask him to repeat that without sounding like a tool.</p>
<p>Yen Sid clearly knew that Sora hadn’t been paying attention and was just putting him on the spot out of cruelty. He wondered for a brief, terrifying moment if Yen Sid could read minds, feeling self-conscious at the mere notion. If he could see what Sora had been ignoring him for... Well, the long and short of that is that Sora would be screwed.</p>
<p>“Well?” The ancient man asked, setting his arms gingerly on his desk. His fingers were interlocked in a loose grip that would have been the perfect picture of relaxed if it wasn’t for the icy eyes that were squinting in Sora’s direction. “Have you come to a decision?”</p>
<p>“Um...” Sora trailed off, scuffing his shoe against the floor and trying to take a small amount of comfort in the squeaking noise that came from the boards. The man leaned forward, arching his eyebrow in mock pensiveness. “Or is the Hero of Light above aiding a Master?”</p>
<p><em> Oh, of course! He’s talking about Master Aqua,</em> Sora thought.<em> She’d gotten back recently from a mission with Ven- they probably need some extra muscle power to unload the gummiship</em>.</p>
<p>He nodded to himself in relief, extracting his hands from his hoodie pockets to run them through his hair. It’s no problem to help with something like that, knowing that she was a light packer and wouldn’t have much to unload in the first place. Even Ven (overpacker that he was) would have been able to neatly fit all of his things into a few bags. They’d be done with it in no time! It was better than hauling buckets of water up the Mysterious Tower’s infinite staircase, at least.</p>
<p>With that, Sora decided to ignore Yen Sid’s jab about the “Hero of Light” business and just agree to help. He flashed an easygoing grin that he didn’t really feel, and that Yen Sid didn’t really buy. The old man kept staring a hole into Sora’s lapels, where his slim fingers had gone to fiddle with a single golden button. Sora put his hands down quickly, clearing his throat. “No, not at all! I can do it!”</p>
<p>Yen Sid made a hum of contemplation, giving one last scathing glance at Sora before leaning back in his chair with a creak. “Do not rush into this without thinking. I feel there will be unforeseen consequences to your haste.”</p>
<p>Was he being that dramatic just to scare him, or was Sora missing something?</p>
<p>After a few seconds of tense silence, he brushed it aside and answered. “No, don’t worry. I got this.”</p>
<p>And thus, as the resident boy plagued with stupid idiot brain fungus, he condemned himself to the worst punishment possibly imaginable. He would almost beg to march water up the infinite stairs if there was an option for it now. Sora bitterly counted an adequate sum of munny for a few weeks off-world, all the while setting off a string of words that Kairi would wash his mouth out with soap for in his mind, because he had stupidly, <em>frustratingly</em> brought it upon himself.</p>
<p>As he’d been about to skip down the stairs to go find Ven, confident and happy that the crisis was averted, Yen Sid had called to him for one last word. “You, Donald, Goofy, and Riku will leave tomorrow at dawn. Do not be late, child,” The old man gruffed. “Or next time, I will make you take notes when I am speaking.”</p>
<p>The blood drained from Sora’s face so quickly that his head spun. It looks like he’s been caught red-handed spacing out again.</p>
<p>He didn’t really care about that too much- his friends caught him lost in his head pretty often, so it’s not like Yen Sid would have any reason to find Sora’s idleness out of place. At worst it was just embarrassing. What Sora was more concerned about was this mission that he apparently just agreed to. Not the worst thing in the world, even if it was quite a bit of a step up from unloading the gummiship. Why Riku and not Aqua?</p>
<p>The realization hit like a market bag of bricks to the face, and Sora felt like the stupidest person alive. How could he have forgotten that Riku was a master too?</p>
<p>Sora stumbled over his next step down the stairs, just barely avoiding falling down by grabbing the railing to his left with a clammy, sweaty grip. His heart started racing even as he righted himself and continued walking to the next landing, now from both the close call and his terrible, consuming anxiety. He <em>couldn’t</em> go on a mission with Riku. Not like this...</p>
<p>Normally, Sora would love a chance to adventure with his best friend, seeing that they’d been separated for far too long. There was so much to show him and teach him. It would be really, really great to finally be able to explore side by side with his favorite person in the multiverse.</p>
<p>(Sora quietly flinched upon thinking that. Maybe he shouldn’t voice that to Kairi...)</p>
<p>Though it appeared like an absolute dream come true, Sora had a serious problem that made it impossible, and nobody, <em>nobody could know about it.</em> <em>Especially</em> not Riku.</p>
<p>Lately, Sora had been really distracted. Again, not new. It was about what he’d been preoccupied with. A secret, burning, twisting, and writhing in his chest that he just couldn’t get rid of no matter how hard he tried. His secret was like a drug- it saturated his veins like poison, hurting him internally, but being so addictive. He’d never be able to stop coming back to it because it made him feel so <em>good</em>.</p>
<p>Sora wasn’t terminally sick or about to die in some way. He wasn’t leaving anyone or anything, at least not permanently. No. His secret was that he was undeniably, totally, topsy-turvy, upside-down, turned around, spun over, inside-out, and out of his <em>mind</em> in love.</p>
<p>In love... with Riku.</p>
<p>He was in love with Riku. His best friend.</p>
<p>His <em>male</em> best friend.</p>
<p>And well, Sora didn’t take issue with it exactly. Love wasn’t something that you could control. If it just so happened to be with your best friend, even if both of you were guys... should it matter? It didn’t. Not in Sora’s opinion.</p>
<p>When he first came to the realization that he liked Riku, it <em>had</em> been a little weird, but Sora found out really quickly that it had nothing to do with their gender and rather with everyone else just <em>assuming</em> that he would fall for Kairi instead.</p>
<p>Before, he never noticed it when people would tease him for this or that, about hanging out with Kairi or holding her hand. As soon as Sora started to recognize his feelings for Riku, though, it felt like being straight was just an unavoidable inevitability etched into the workings of the universe.</p>
<p><em> Everyone</em> thought that Sora liked Kairi. Even Riku had thought that he liked her once, which was very helpful in the meticulous shattering of Sora’s heart, thank-you-very-much. (Unlike the others, Riku managed to drop it after seeing him burst into tears of frustration, and he hadn’t mentioned the idea since. Still- it <em>hurt</em>.)</p>
<p>It was inescapable in conversation. His friends would make fun of him about it over text. People would casually mention her in passing, each time giving Sora a “knowing” wink that made him sick to his stomach. They didn’t know <em>anything</em> about how he was feeling. Maybe, considering how highly they seemed to value him-and-Kairi as an item, that was for the best.</p>
<p>Nobody wanted to know or seemed to care that when Sora had dreams of first kisses, sweet and sticky from the juice of a paopu fruit, he didn’t see a hint of red hair or pink clothing- he saw Riku, heart-stoppingly gentle, washing over him in a wave of blue-green and silver like the sea foam that was licking at their ankles.</p>
<p>And, well, Sora would have his own mini-panic attack about that when he’d woken up. He didn’t say that accepting himself was immediately easy, even if he wasn’t scared of the emotions themselves. Sora was more freaked out by the prospect that he was the only one who was like this.</p>
<p>The hardest part about it had been coming to the realization that even though Sora thought he was normal, other people... didn’t.</p>
<p>And he guessed that made him <em>not normal</em>.</p>
<p>Normal people dreamt of beaches, true. Soft sand, beautiful sunsets, and the distant call of seagulls. They wanted to be there and enjoy the sun, or splash in the water, or feel the breeze. That’s what Sora used to dream of, before all that melted into teal colored eyes and silver hair between his fingers.</p>
<p>Normal people didn’t dream of their best friend, but it looks like Sora’s brain didn’t get the memo. He just <em>couldn’t stop</em>.</p>
<p>Sora was <em>addicted</em> to the butterflies in his stomach that appeared whenever Riku would shyly smile, was obsessed with the soothing, deep sound of his voice. Everything that he did made Sora’s heart pound out of his chest with affection.</p>
<p>The perfect place, the beach, as some see it, could never be complete for Sora without Riku there. It never had been.</p>
<p>He couldn’t imagine the beach without seeing footprints in the sand next to his. As a child and all throughout his early teens, whenever Sora needed an escape, it was Riku who was there to hold his hand and whisper sweet nothings until he was calm again. It was only in the past year or so that the dreams had gotten... quite so <em>embarrassing</em>.</p>
<p>Sora’s mind was full of the sway of the water and the sound of waves crashing on the shore, through sweet,<em> sweet</em> fantasies of Riku dipping him low in the orange of the sunset, looking at Sora like he was his whole world.</p>
<p>In his dreams, it always went the same. Riku would give a smile that was so <em>gentle</em>, the soft kind that only surfaced when he felt truly safe. No one else received this kind of smile from him, which made Sora treasure it all that much more. He’d do the same even if Riku was as free with smiles as Sora was. They were special because they were <em>Riku’s</em>.</p>
<p>He would lean in closer, licking those lips that were like the silky pink gloss of ballet slippers, or maybe the little coral-colored seashells that Riku would press into his palm while they were digging in the sand. The analogy didn’t matter so much to Sora as the whole picture, because they were just so full and beautiful. Sometimes Sora would swoon from just the sight.</p>
<p>Riku smelled like cocoa butter and jasmine, and something a little bit salty, which was probably from the sea spray whipping through the early-night air. Sora’s knees would go weak when Riku would nuzzle into the side of his face, wrapping his strong biceps around Sora’s thinner, lean frame. His arms were so warm, and he felt like <em>home</em>.</p>
<p><em>I love you,</em> Riku would say then, in a whisper just loud enough to hear over his thundering pulse. The breath tickled his ear and Sora <em>whimpered</em>. Riku held him tighter.</p>
<p>Overwhelmed from all the sensory input, Sora would have no choice then but to just let Riku kiss the ever-living daylights out of him. It was a daydream that Sora was utterly powerless to. He lost to it every time, drowning in the tide, unable to do anything but melt into Riku’s embrace.</p>
<p>And after all that, when Sora would resurface, flushed, breathing hard and feeling drunk on love, he wondered why <em>this</em> was considered wrong.</p>
<p>Why did he have to repress it? Why did Sora have to wait until he was alone in his bed at night, breaking down into sobs in order to let himself feel it? Why did he need to mumble desperate confessions into his pillow with tear tracks running down his face, knowing that he could never tell anyone what he was feeling because they just wouldn’t understand? And how would this be any better if it was Kairi?</p>
<p>Sora tried, he really, <em>really</em> tried to imagine himself in that position with her. It just didn’t work. His heart was always unimpressed, not even bothering to skip a beat at his favorite part (when Riku said “I love you”). He just felt stupid and bored whenever he swapped him out. He even tried with other types of scenarios, usually things like fairytales that he would come across in the tower’s library, but the only thing that ever came out of it was trying very hard not to think of Riku’s gorgeous eyes when he was supposed to look into Kairi’s.</p>
<p>His mind just kept wandering back to the beach, and when he was imagining Riku’s soft lips pressing kisses to wherever he could reach, Sora knew that his heart wouldn’t stop and then double time like this for anyone else.</p>
<p>How would Sora begin to tell his friends that he was in love with Riku when they were still stuck on the idea of him and Kairi? Well, the answer is that he would just never tell them. And that’s what Sora had been avoiding for the past few months or so, namely, telling them anything remotely related to romance. When someone got gossipy at the table, he slinked off to his bedroom without a word. When someone teased him about Kairi, he forced himself to smile and shake it off.</p>
<p>The other day, he opened a door to find Roxas asking Xion about her Saturday plans, and it sounded enough like a date that Sora turned on his heel and walked right back out. He was going to eliminate the problem entirely by never interacting with it.</p>
<p>The problem with this not-solution was that, in order to avoid interaction with love, Sora kind of had to... avoid Riku. Not entirely, or anything. At the end of the day, Riku was still a friend, and Sora would never avoid someone completely without giving an explanation. He hadn’t been skipping meals or dodging around corners just so he wouldn’t see Riku- it was just that he didn’t want to be <em>alone</em> with him for too long.</p>
<p>It was easier to distract himself when there were other people around, because he would get a lot more scrutiny from different directions when he was acting off. Sora didn’t know <em>what</em> he would do when the day finally came where he couldn’t duck out the door fast enough and it would just be the two of them.</p>
<p>He felt like his heart would beat loud enough that everyone would hear it.</p>
<p>He <em>couldn’t</em> let Riku hear it.</p>
<p>Riku wouldn’t think that Sora was weird. He knew what it was like, being ostracized for something that couldn’t be controlled. In his case, it was the presence of darkness in his heart, and in Sora’s, it was the presence of love. Riku wouldn’t ever hate him for something like that, especially now that he’s gotten past his middle school angst phase.</p>
<p>Sora, at the end of everything, just didn’t want to face the reality that Riku wasn't able to love him back the way that he wanted. Riku wouldn’t hate him, but wouldn’t love him, and being the kind person that he is, he would let Sora down with an apologetic look that was really, genuinely sorry.</p>
<p>The sincerity would <em>kill</em> him.</p>
<p>Yeah, Sora couldn’t let Riku find out under any circumstances.</p>
<p>With a resigned sigh, Sora pulled himself out of his head for long enough to zip up his luggage, throwing it next to his bed with a crash. Tomorrow was going to be a really long day, and depending on how long the mission lasted, it might even turn into a long month.</p>
<p>Yipee. He was so excited to hide his feelings from Riku in close quarters for weeks on end.</p>
<p>Sora put his head in his hands. He would probably always be shoving his feelings down again and again and again until someone suggested that he date Kairi enough for Sora to get sick of it and walk himself off a cliff. </p>
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